This invention relates to a kitchen ventilator for removing air laden with grease, smoke, fumes and moisture rising from various types of cooking units.
In a restaurant kitchen, for example, there are usually a number of cooking units lined up side by side in a row. Some of these cooking units such as broilers and fryers produce considerable quantities of smoke, fumes, grease particles and moisture while other units such as ranges and griddles generate such pollutants in considerably less amounts. Kitchen ventilators have heretofore been designed with sufficient air flow capacity to remove the smoke, fumes, grease and moisture from the most active of the pollution generating cooking units such as the broilers and fryers. This results in excess and unnecessary ventilation for those cooking units generating less pollution such as the ranges and the griddles.
Such excess ventilation is wasteful of energy in two ways. First, an excessive flow of air must be handled by the exhaust fan, thus requiring a larger fan motor which consumes more electrical energy than necessary. Second, the excess air withdrawn from the kitchen is replaced, at least in part, by air from the dining room and other parts of the restaurant. In cold weather this produces a heat loss in the dining room and other parts of the restaurant which must be compensated by the central heating system. In hot weather an excess of cool air is withdrawn from the dining room, increasing the load on the air conditioning system and again requiring additional electric power to maintain a comfortable temperature in the dining room.
Objects of the present invention are therefore to provide a kitchen ventilator which does not remove an excessive volume of air from the atmosphere over cooking units which do not generate large quantities of smoke, fumes, grease particles and moisture, to provide a kitchen ventilator having supplemental inlet throat choke means to reduce the airflow over such cooking units and to provide such choke means as attachments to be applied to appropriate parts of the ventilator without reducing the airflow to other parts of the ventilator which must be capable of exhausting large quantities of such pollutants.